Gray (Book 3)
Copyright © 2016 by Cadle-Sparks Books
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.
Welcome to Idaho City
The sign was metal, the words still visible through scorching that had happened during The Event’s long fire.
Despite the black streaks, the sign spoke of the good old days, seven months ago, when civilization was intact and the world robustly populated. It looked almost normal—or would have, had it not been for the pair of human feet attached over the first two words. The feet had been severed from their owner, and hex bolts had been jammed between the metatarsals.
Coral assumed that behind the sign, nuts were spun onto the bolts to secure them there. The sub-zero temperatures had held the feet together and, without any predators and with precious few insects left alive, nothing had gnawed at them. Even bacteria were slow to work in this frigid weather.
The feet were pristine, really, and if the owner were still alive, he would be sure to recognize them as his own.
Coral was reasonably certain the owner was no longer alive.
Benjamin gripped the rifle and spun in a slow circle, looking for enemies, finding none, and stepping closer to her. “I’m reading that as a keep-out sign,” he said, in a low, tight voice.
“You think?” Coral shivered, but mostly from the cold. The severed feet were awful, and disgusting, and as little as four months ago, she would have
felt
shocked and sickened and sad at seeing such a sight. Today she felt only a whisper of any of those feelings, and all she could think now was, are they still edible?
“I wouldn’t chance it,” Benjamin said.
“Did I say that aloud?” She really had no idea that she had. She was so weak, so dizzy from hunger, she could barely get a full sentence uttered before she forgot how she had begun it. She focused harder to get the next words out. “They wouldn’t have gone bad. Not in this cold.”
“No. I mean, I don’t want to chance pissing off the guy who put them up there in warning. We need to move along—
now
.”
“Saved again from cannibalism,” she said and dragged her weary feet away from the sign and its dual message. Welcome to—and get the hell out of—Idaho City.
It had been three weeks since they escaped the UFO cultists. After the dynamite had killed the ones chasing them, Coral had pawed through the body parts looking for supplies. Only the one rifle had stayed intact, a 20-20, no scope, and Benjamin now carried it. They had taken what few clothes were usable off the bodies and all the socks. Coral’s hiking shoes were, after all these months of walking, beginning to split at the seams. She had nothing to fix them with, and nowhere to acquire new ones. So she wore several sets of socks and every night dried them in that night’s snow cave.
The fact that she had taken some of them off severed legs blown off a torso of someone she had helped to kill? That bothered her not at all. It had been them or her, and she was glad she had survived.
But she missed her good backpack, and the sledge with the harness that Benjamin had built so long ago. Now they were stuck with putting all they owned into two burlap bags. Having no way to carry them easily, they shifted the bags from shoulder to shoulder, from arm to arm, and limped along the best they could.
These last few days, Coral had given in to exhaustion late in the day and dragged hers over the deep snow pack. Whenever she did, and Benjamin noticed, he called a halt for the night, and they dug their snow cave and she fell asleep within seconds of lying down. They were approaching the winter solstice, and nights were long. She had no problem sleeping through a twelve-hour night, but even in her weakened state, fifteen hours was too much sleep.
The haunch of meat they had taken from the cultists was gone now, and the bones had been used up as soup six nights ago. Five nights ago, they had smashed the cooked leg bones with rocks and licked out the few flecks of remaining marrow and made a final soup from the fragments, a broth that had almost no flavor.
For four days now, they had eaten nothing. They needed to stumble across a lake so that she could fish. Or Benjamin needed to find game. But they had seen no signs of any living animal for many weeks now. Ice fishing might be their only hope.
The cultists had owned two nanny goats, and a donkey, and while her mind wandered in the fog of hunger, she thought about how good they would taste. But the cultists were well armed and far behind them now. She and Benjamin had done well to escape them. But she was so damned hungry, she kept imagining a steaming bowl of goat-leg soup.
Thinking about her hunger had once again drained her of strength. Coral dropped her bag and sat where she was. Benjamin hiked a few steps on and glanced back. He stopped, too. “You’ll freeze your butt off.”
“I have no butt left. My body ate it all up already, keeping me alive.”
“You done in for the day?”
She bit back the urge to say she was. “No. We need to keep going. We need to find a lake, or a town, or food somehow. And tomorrow, I’ll just be weaker.” It was too easy imagining crawling into a snow cave one night and never coming back out, starving to death in her little dim space, letting the fifteen hours of darkness stretch out into an eternity of it.
“If we separated—” he said.
“No.” She had sworn to herself that would never happen again. The cultists had separated them, and that had nearly ended in disaster. They’d stay together from now on.
“We could cover more ground.” When he saw her stubborn look, he said, “I mean we walk parallel, in sight of each other.”
She pulled a bottle of water out of her sweater and took a drink while she thought about it. “You really think that’ll help?”
“It might. I’d hate to miss a reservoir or lake by a quarter-mile.” He tugged his bandana down and scratched his beard. Then he pulled the bandana back up. They both still wore them to filter the ash from the air.
She figured by this time, they had inhaled far too much of it. They’d probably die of it eventually. Maybe that contributed to her exhaustion, that her lungs weren’t getting her brain enough oxygen any more. She shook herself out of the depressing line of thought and said, “Okay. But closer than a quarter-mile. I want to see you at every moment, not have you fade out in the ash haze.”
For a few hours they walked parallel paths, both of them scanning to either side, looking for any telltale depression in the land that might suggest a lake or reservoir or the line of a stream. There was almost nothing to see but ashen air and ash-gray snow, a monochromatic, lifeless world. The few fat trees that had still stood after the vast wildfire, dead and black, had been pulled down by their own weight, and most had been buried in the endless snow. If they did find food, it’d be just as hard to find fuel to cook it.
The snow started falling again in earnest, and Coral waved at Benjamin and headed back toward him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I don’t think I can go much farther today.”
“We shouldn’t anyway, with the snow falling. Too big a chance of missing something.”
When they were digging the snow cave, she noticed he was favoring one arm. “I want to take a look at that gunshot wound, while there’s still light.”
“It’s healing,” he said, obviously trying to put her off.
That made her even more concerned. “Show me.”
He gave her an exasperated look. “There’s nothing you can do for it.”
Alarm at his words pushed back her exhaustion. “Benjamin, let me see it.
Now
.”
“Let’s finish—”
“Sit. Jacket off. Sweater off.”
He blew out an irritated breath. “Fine, fine.”
When he had rolled his shirt up past the gunshot wound, she examined it. It looked too red. She sniffed at it, and it didn’t smell rotten. But when she pressed lightly around it, she could feel it was hot. “You’ve been keeping this clean, right?”
“As clean as I can without soap.”
She bit her chapped lips as she thought. She didn’t like that hot flesh. She lifted his arm to make sure there weren’t red streaks running out from the wound on the other side. There weren’t, but the area near to the wound was redder than the rest of him. She pressed at it and he bit back a gasp. “Hurt?”
“No.”
“Stop lying.” She pressed again and he jerked back from her touch. “It does hurt. I’m afraid it’s getting infected.”
“And like I said, nothing you can do for it.”
“I wish I hadn’t lost the antibiotics.”
“You only had a couple, right?”
“Better than zero, which is what we have now.” There had also been aspirin at the compound, but because of the way they had escaped, she’d had to leave it behind. Even that might be useful. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t shoot me.” He rolled his sleeve back down and she reached up to still his hand.
“Wait. Let me think first.” If they survived the current food crisis, medicine was going to be a problem, not only now, but in the future. There weren’t any plants, so no willow bark tea or natural remedy poultices were available—if she knew the plants to look for, which she did not. A memory popped into her head. “Maggots. If we had maggots or leaches.”
“If we had either in any quantity, I’d eat them.” His lip twitched in the almost-smile she had come to know so well.
“I don’t know what to do. If I let it go, do nothing, I’m afraid it will get worse. The only thing I know about at all—the one low-tech option open to me—is debriding it.”
“Which is?”
“Ripping the scabs off and scrubbing it out, hoping any sick tissue gets scrubbed away.” She winced in sympathy. “It would hurt a lot.” It had been done to a diabetes patient in the hospital when she volunteered there, but her only part in it was listening to the patient describe the procedure a few hours later, still groggy from pain meds. She got the gist, though—scrub away bad tissue, leave the good, and then wrap it well to keep out infection. It could be a bloody job.
“If you think you need to, I can take it. You’re a good doctor, Coral. Maybe the only doctor left on the continent.”
“Then the continent is in deep trouble.” But she appreciated his confidence in her. All she had was a year of pre-med, some volunteer hours in the hospital, and watching surgery shows on educational television. Still, from those imperfect sources of information, a new thought was forming.
He said, “I’m—”
“Wait,” she said, holding up a finger. “Let me think.” The debriding patient had said after some cutting, they had finished up with water from a syringe. Coral had no syringe, but she might be able to fashion something. A hollow tube, and pressure from her breath. Or would her own mouth’s bacteria get in there and make it worse in the long run? Probably. She tried to imagine the procedure, out here, with no supplies. Was there a way to fashion some sort of air pump? And where to get a hollow tube? If she could find the right kind of plants submerged in the water, there might be a hollow stem sturdy enough to modify it. The exact sort of hollow branch she’d rejected when making arrows—that was what she wanted now.
“I’m getting a little cold here.”
She refocused on him. “We need a lake. I know, we need one for fish anyway. But now for this, too.” She gestured for him to put his clothes back on. “Sorry to make you wait. You’ll be warm once we’re in the snow cave.” Her body heat would warm him back up in no time.
Her exhaustion returned as she helped dig their cave for the night. A burst of adrenaline from worrying over Benjamin had made it retreat for a few minutes, but now it was back full-force. She rolled out her sleeping bag and, leaving Benjamin to worry about filling their water bottles with snow to melt in the cave, she was asleep in seconds.
The next day was hard. No—not
hard
, not a strong enough word. It was almost impossible. She had been too long without food, and too long before that on short rations. She stumbled more than walked, and Benjamin finally took her burlap sack from her.
“No. You can’t manage both,” she said, bracing her hands on her thighs and trying to catch her breath.
“I can.”
“No.” She straightened herself and reached halfheartedly for it.
“For a while, I can take it. Don’t worry.”
“At least I’m not hungry any more.”
He looked closely at her, concern in his eyes. “That sounds bad.”
“You are hungry?”
“Yeah. Starved. Can’t stop thinking of food.” He pointed ahead. “I think that might be the line of a road, right there. I don’t know the number—don’t know this end of Idaho very well—but let’s follow it for the day, or for as long as we can see it well enough to keep to it.”
She nodded. She didn’t see what he was talking about, but he had a better eye for the landscape than she did.
Walking was easier without the bag of supplies. She still stumbled on nothing, and she kept spacing out, mentally drifting away from reality, only to come back and find that somehow, she had kept plodding forward.
They stopped to rest three times that morning. The third time, Benjamin said, “I think the road is turning to the south.” He pointed into the sky.
There was no sun, not even a vague white circle like you might see through dense storm clouds. The two of them didn’t cast shadows, had not cast shadows in seven months. But the sky did seem lighter in one direction, and at this time of year—almost the winter solstice—the sun would be due south at noon. They had to guess at the time, but noon felt about right. So the vague lightness in that direction might be south. The days of knowing direction, like those of knowing precise dates and times, were lost, burned away like the grand forest that once covered Idaho’s hills and valleys.